33

White Lake

Still Sunday, 23 September

My face punches through the surface, I’m swallowed whole, things get more real than they were a moment ago. When they were already pretty real, just not as real as being in cold black water with something awful living in it and a guy just above the surface with night-vision goggles, a hunting rifle, and dynamite.

Humans, incidentally, are even more compressible than fish.

“Violet!” I yell when I break the surface.

I think the reason I’ve been thrown so far, and in such a disorienting way, is that the canoe deformed when the harpoon hit it, then snapped partially back into shape, shooting me into space like an arrow from a bow.

“Here!” she says.

I swim toward her fast, head down because it’s too dark to see her anyway, my clothes trailing every movement with the wrong rhythm. I’d ditch them, but I don’t want to take the time, and I’m still fooling myself that there’s something in them I’ll be able to use later.

One of Violet’s hands swipes my side. I grab onto her and surface. She’s mostly invisible, but her eyes and hair glint like the lake.

I say “We go down, hold hands, swim as far as possible, surface, don’t speak, do it again till we get to shore. Okay?”

“Yes,” she says.

We quickly kiss, if that’s the kind of thing you believe we’ve been doing, and go under. Into the high-pitched silence of the water, which seems to be waiting for either an explosion or a creature that wants to bite our heads off, whichever shows up first.

We swim what feels like a long distance, in as straight a line as we can, then Violet squeezes my hand and we come up gasping. Go down again and this time swim until our hands touch the rocks along the bottom and we know we’ve reached the shallows. Raise our heads out of the water just in time to hear the rattlesnake hiss of a fuse.

I don’t think the dynamite lands all that near us. I don’t feel a splash, either when it hits the surface or when it explodes. I just feel the force go through me like something kicking me in the balls, shredding my muscles, and quadrupling my blood pressure at the same time. Then I realize I’m back under water, drowning.

But only for a moment. This is no time to lounge about. Violet and I claw our way onto shore. Then lurch, unable to stand upright, into the pitch-dark woods.

Which are like a birth canal lined with midgets trying to trip us. As we speed-stumble deeper, I keep hammering into things that are either vertical or horizontal, I can’t tell which, and hearing Violet do the same. When I reach back to grab her hand, hers or mine is slick with blood.

We seem to go on like this for about an hour, although it’s really probably more like ten minutes. Because how long can it take to land an amphibious boat, follow a couple of people who can’t see into some woods, and start shooting at them with a hunting rifle?

The first bullet cracks into a tree just ahead of us with the noise of someone hitting a home run. The second smashes close enough to spray moss into my mouth, and splinters into the right side of my face and neck.

Conveniently, Violet and I both trip over things around then, and end up face-to-face.

“This isn’t going to work,” I say, trying not to spit moss on her. “We have to split up. You go left, I’ll keep going straight. If he follows you instead of me, I’ll circle back and get behind him.”

“I’ll do the same if he follows you.”

“Don’t. It’s too dangerous. He’ll see you.”

“And he won’t see you?”

“No. Go.”

This time there’s no kiss even if you believe that kind of thing is going on, maybe out of a shared recognition that I’m back to lying to her. But she does trail a hand down the side of my face that has splinters in it.

Then I’m bashing forward again, peeling off my jacket to leave a trail, patting it down before I drop it for items that might help me kill this fucker. Finding only a digital camera in a Neoprene pouch. If I were Professor Marmoset, I’d be set.

Being someone else entirely, I dedicate thirty seconds of half-concentration to figuring out a way to turn the piece of shit into a night-vision scope. Is there some kind of filter you’re supposed to remove? Some submenu of a submenu you’re supposed to reprogram? Then I give up on it. Turns out I’m not an electrical engineer.

What I am is someone who’s supposedly good at taking out maniacs in the woods. And it’s true I’m looking forward to completing the rightward curve I’ve been trying to make outside this fucker’s peripheral vision. As far as I can tell I’m almost back to the spot where I split off from Violet.

Which is why the next rifle shot I hear makes my blood go cold.

It doesn’t come from where it should come from. Not if he’s following me, and not if he’s following Violet. It comes from a completely different direction, and from too far away.

Meaning he is following Violet, and I have no idea where the fuck I’ve been going. Nor do I have any chance of moving fast enough and far enough to keep him from killing her.

I yell “HEY! FUCKER!” Lunge in the direction the gunshot seemed to come from. Get enmeshed in a web of branches. Hear another rifle shot.

It’s then that I decide to smash the camera. Not because that might work, but because I can’t think of anything that might work. Or maybe I should throw the camera instead. Bean that fucker in the head right before he shoots her, pure luck.

As I draw back my arm, though, I realize that neither of those things is what it’s time for.

What it’s time for is for me to repeat my mantra. Which is:

I am one dumb fucking shithead.

I turn the back of the camera away from me so it won’t blast my retinas, cover the front with my palm, and press the “on” button. To my wide-open pupils, the glare from the monitor lights up everything around me.

It’s interesting. I’m not even on the ground. For the last little while I’ve been moving upward through a tangle of branches. I drop back to the dirt through the first hole I see.

After that I’m in motion. I can’t see very far ahead, but I can run. I can duck around trees I would have otherwise had to find with my face, and can spot dead ends before flailing into them. Eventually I even learn to put the camera on picture display so it doesn’t keep automatically retracting the lens and turning off.

I hear a close-by rifle shot and start to move faster. Come around a tree and almost slam into the shooter’s back.

I’m shocked that he’s moving so slowly. Faster than I was when I couldn’t see anything, but barely. He’s just ambling along, doing leisurely terminator head sweeps with his night-vision goggles while keeping his rifle still, like he’s used to all this and doesn’t want to tire himself out.

He hasn’t heard me or noticed the light from the camera yet. I’m tempted to just kill him—straight punch to the fifth vertebra, Nice being chased by ya—but if Violet’s dead I’ll want him around to answer for that. And if she’s alive she probably has some questions of her own.

I grab the man’s rifle away and use my hand with the camera in it to lift his night-vision goggles off and illuminate his face.

“Aw, fuck,” I say out loud.

It’s Dr. McQuillen.

★★★

On the way back to the boat, with Violet in the lead wearing McQuillen’s goggles and me at the back still holding the camera, I let McQuillen bang his head on the occasional branch. I’m cold and I’m in pain, and Violet was sheathed in blood when I gave her McQuillen’s anorak. I would have given her his shirt, too, but I wasn’t sure someone his age would survive the cold, no matter how fit he obviously is.

In case I need to feel worse, I also think about how I went all the way through his office without realizing his CT scanner was missing. Sold, I’m now thinking, to pay for the amphibious boat.

We reach the boat in question.

I say “All right. What’s in the water?”

“I don’t know.”

I don’t ask again. Just grab the back of his shirt and wade thigh-deep into the lake with him. Use my teeth to open the knife I took from his coat and cut his shoulder enough to bleed. Plunge him under.

Violet gets the boat’s running lights on behind us. It’s weird to be able to see normally.

“What is it?” I say when I pull him back up.

“I’ll tell you!” he screams. “Get me out of the water!”

I do.

He does.